This Israeli
film showed at the Mill Valley Film Festival this year. Written, directed, and
starring in the title role by Hagar Ben-Asher, was quite a disappointing experience,
and honestly I found to be a most preposterous and shallow analysis of
human relationships and sexuality.
The main character, Tamar, a single mother of two, lives a comfortable life that includes a rotation of regular lovers in the country town she resides in. A chance meeting of an attractive old acquaintance, Shai, puts her lovers on the back burner as she falls into a more traditional monogamous relationship. After she becomes pregnant, there is a noticeable lull in her attitude. Wherein she begins to somewhat reject this more standard situation of one partner, home, kids.
What's truly noticeable in this is that most of the drama derives from the conflicts created by a very selfish person for no reason other than to satisfy her sexual appetites. Who doesn't communicate very well with the people she brings into her little "world". Perhaps this is the point, to have some comment on emotional development, selfishness, how to communicate what is and is not working. These all would be welcome insight to complicated relationship dynamics, perhaps a notion of the selfishness of sex. But in the end I didn’t end up feeling there was a very interesting or in depth look at these themes, or our motivations regarding the complexities of sexual relationships. It consisted of Tamar silently suffocating in the unit she creates with Shai. It created a pretentious, ugly, and ultimately useless piece of work, I somewhat felt only to sensationalize.
The ending I'm sure will upset plenty of people, it did me quite a bit. And I think it will not only because the subject of the ending is an idea/image of pure evil and wrong, but that there is truly no basis for it whatsoever. The motivations for it was in no way logical, well…I guess I can see show she drew those lines…but it was so unnecessary and uncharacteristic of Shai’s character thus far that I had to cry “Bullshit” on the whole thing. I’m purposefully leaving out the details of the ending because if you choose to investigate this film, I want you to be able to have the same blank reaction I did, so you can draw your own honest assessment.
I
had such a strong reaction to watching this, that when I saw it was scheduled
to play again on my shift as projectionist, I refused to do the screening. Not
for any censor reason, but I just couldn’t find any justification in this work.
Almost similar to Roger Ebert’s reaction to “Blue Velvet” if you’ve ever seen
it (and if you haven’t YouTube it, its awesome).The main character, Tamar, a single mother of two, lives a comfortable life that includes a rotation of regular lovers in the country town she resides in. A chance meeting of an attractive old acquaintance, Shai, puts her lovers on the back burner as she falls into a more traditional monogamous relationship. After she becomes pregnant, there is a noticeable lull in her attitude. Wherein she begins to somewhat reject this more standard situation of one partner, home, kids.
What's truly noticeable in this is that most of the drama derives from the conflicts created by a very selfish person for no reason other than to satisfy her sexual appetites. Who doesn't communicate very well with the people she brings into her little "world". Perhaps this is the point, to have some comment on emotional development, selfishness, how to communicate what is and is not working. These all would be welcome insight to complicated relationship dynamics, perhaps a notion of the selfishness of sex. But in the end I didn’t end up feeling there was a very interesting or in depth look at these themes, or our motivations regarding the complexities of sexual relationships. It consisted of Tamar silently suffocating in the unit she creates with Shai. It created a pretentious, ugly, and ultimately useless piece of work, I somewhat felt only to sensationalize.
The ending I'm sure will upset plenty of people, it did me quite a bit. And I think it will not only because the subject of the ending is an idea/image of pure evil and wrong, but that there is truly no basis for it whatsoever. The motivations for it was in no way logical, well…I guess I can see show she drew those lines…but it was so unnecessary and uncharacteristic of Shai’s character thus far that I had to cry “Bullshit” on the whole thing. I’m purposefully leaving out the details of the ending because if you choose to investigate this film, I want you to be able to have the same blank reaction I did, so you can draw your own honest assessment.
Catherine Breillat does a much more insightful job with material like this. Such as “Fat Girl”, drawing such deftness to the commentary of social stigmas, and ideas of positive vs. negative influence on adolescences and their outlooks and development of sexuality. Among many other themes…love her films
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